We Three Neals: Stories Told Through Three Generations of Working Women

The following article is a transcript of interviews conducted between three generations of women I know well—women who inspire me, challenge me and love me: my family.

Lisa Neal—Interviewer (Me)

Alyce Neal—Grandmother (Gma)

Kathryn Neal—Mother (Mom)

Me: What do you think I do for a living?

Gma: [laughs] I haven’t quite figured that out. It’s something that I don’t know anything about. You have something to do with buildings. I guess you’re constructing buildings or reconstructing them.

Mom: [laughs] I’m still really confused about what you do. Me: That’s what Grandma said. Mom: I know you’re doing all these weird, computerized and technical things that you never used to be interested in. I know it’s something that has to do with making 3D models and you scan stuff and see behind walls and whatnot.

Me: What was your primary profession throughout your life?

Gma: Mother.

Mom: Pharmacist.

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Me: What factors led you to this profession?

Gma: I got pregnant. And I kept getting pregnant. I had five accidents. [laughs]

Mom: I really enjoyed chemistry, but it wasn’t something I wanted to teach. I’m surprised I went into pharmacy because I didn’t know any pharmacists, let alone female pharmacists. At the time I graduated, there was only one other female pharmacist in my entire city and my graduating class was maybe 25 percent female. Me: How much of the workforce do you think is female now? Mom: Maybe 80 percent—it's a lot.

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Me: What did you enjoy most about your job?

Gma: I guess that I could stay home and do it, not have to commute.

Mom: Ironically, I liked teaching people about their medications. I liked helping them understand what they were taking, why, what to expect.

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Me: What’s your special skill or secret talent that made you excel at your job?

Gma: Who said I was good at it? [laughs] Me: Assuming you are, what’s your special skill? Gma: Civility. I just tried to teach my kids to behave and do the right thing.

Mom: I was able to have a lot of empathy. I empathized with what people were going through, and at the time, even though we were a chain pharmacy, people felt like it was a neighborhood pharmacy—they could chit chat, they felt comfortable asking questions.

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Me: What did you dislike most about your job?

Gma: Probably that there was no time off. It’s 24/7. Because I didn’t work outside the home, I had to do more around the house. I had to make our clothes, grow our food, can it and freeze it.

Mom: Corporate. I liked the ideas they had, but not their implementation. They wanted to somehow implement these ideas that they thought would be magical, but in reality, all these things take extra time and extra customer interaction. They take time away from our primary role of filling prescriptions. And they graded you on all of it. You got dinged and harassed if you didn’t meet all their metrics.

Me: What challenges or barriers did you face?

Gma: The fact that I was so young and didn’t know what I was doing for starters. Me: How old were you when you had Aunt Marilyn? Gma: 17. I’d had two kids before I was 20.

Mom: I’ll tell you a story: the very first job I ever had, on my first day, an older man walked into the store and said to me, “Is your father here?” And I looked at him and said, “I’m sorry, my father doesn’t work here.” He clarified that he wanted to talk to the pharmacist. When I explained that I was the pharmacist, he asked more specifically for the “gray-haired guy.” People weren’t used to seeing a female in that role, so especially if a male pharmacist worked there, it was harder to be taken seriously.

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Me: Were there moments you thought you couldn’t do it—that you weren’t good enough or you weren’t ‘something’ enough?

Gma: Oh yeah. [silence] Me: Elaborate. Gma: Well...how much time you got? [laughs] I just felt like I was always in the hole—like I was always trying to get ahead, and I never quite made it.

Mom: Oh yeah. I often felt like I wasn’t fast enough, and I couldn’t multi-task well enough. And after a while I felt insecure about the [medicinal] knowledge. Some of the new medications...you almost feel like you need to go back to school to learn what’s the mechanism of action? How exactly does it work? Especially the new diabetes medications. When I first started out, they were still using pork and beef insulins! Me: Gross.

Me: What’s the best (or hardest) lesson you learned along the way?

Gma: [pauses to think] Not to worry or fret over every little thing.

Mom: [pauses to think] The experience that stood out most to me was, we used to make this Brompton’s Cocktail for cancer patients. They don’t make it anymore, but back then, we had to make it ourselves in the pharmacy. It was a combination of morphine and cocaine. One time, we ended up being short on the cocaine and I was freaking out because I thought I’d made it incorrectly. I had to go to the customer’s house and remake the medication, apologize. I was so sensitive about it. I was just wrecked thinking that I could have hurt this person. The lesson: check, check and recheck. I actually developed a little bit of OCD as a result of that experience.

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Me: Do you have any regrets?

Gma: I regret that I didn’t enjoy my kids more when they were little. Even though I was home all the time with them, I was just trying to keep them alive and keep them from killing each other, and I never really sat down and enjoyed them.

Mom: [thinks long and hard again] I sometimes wonder if I would have enjoyed a different career more, but I’m not so sure I would have. I really did like what I was doing. I just didn’t like where it was going. I didn’t like that it became big business as opposed to caring about people.

Me: What information or advice would you give to women in the workplace who are trying to make a difference?

Gma: Just know your limits. Relax a little bit and go with the flow.

Mom: Do what you know is right. Keep pushing but know that you won’t see overnight change. You might not even witness the change during your career or your lifetime but know that you’re making a difference for future generations.